Online Casino Compatibility

Gambling goes back thousands of years, and up until the late 20th century, gambling was limited to physical locations where people would come together to place wagers on various things. Casinos offered people a place to visit where they would bet on games of chance against the house, and were very popular, provided it was convenient to visit one.

If this were an open market, in other words seeing casinos set up wherever there was a demand, access through the ages would have been significantly enhanced, but restrictive laws interfered with this. For instance, for decades, the only legal casinos in the United States were in Nevada, where a lot of people traveled to, but at significant inconvenience and additional expense.

As the internet progressed, it became feasible to offer casino play online, which changed things completely. Now, instead of having to go somewhere, people had the opportunity to play casino games to their heart’s content right on their computers, in a virtual environment.

While virtual online casino gambling doesn’t quite have the social component that physical casino gambling does, you don’t deal with people face to face for instance, it does provide the element that really matters here, real money casino wagering.

Instead of people going to a casino, casinos now come to you, wherever you happen to be, and at whatever time you desire, and all that’s required is a device to play the games on and an internet connection.

Getting Access To Online Casinos

When online casinos first came on the scene, players had to download software in order to play at them. This software had to be written for a specific operating system, as software designed for one operating system isn’t generally compatible with another.

Due to the overwhelming majority of desktop computers running Windows, the software that was created was written for this format, and while there were some people left out of this initially, Mac users primarily, there were way more than enough Windows users for the online casino market to experience huge growth.

Mac users were used to being shut out of certain programs, as it often was the case that developers would choose to go with Windows software only, and although the software market was making a lot more headway in offering both, online casinos were slow to catch up with this trend.

So some users would use workarounds such as a dual boot, and a few casinos started offering play to Mac users as well as the industry matured a bit. It didn’t take long though for an even better solution to emerge, one that didn’t require a software download at all.

The Coming Of No Download Online Casino Play

Given that the online casino market is a competitive one, and a very competitive one at that, some online casino sites started seeing those who were unable or unwilling to download their Windows software as an opportunity.

This included not only some Mac users, without the means to play in a Windows environment when that was all that was offered at a casino, but also users of other operating systems such as Linux, people who could not download software on certain computers such as those at work due to firewalls, and also those who just were unwilling to download casino software.

The technology was there to make this happen, to allow players to play at online casinos right in their browser, by using Flash technology, which had advanced to the point where this became rather simple to implement. A programming language called Java had also emerged which was very well suited to cross platform gaming, and no download became a reality.

Now, it didn’t matter what operating system you used, you just visited the casino site and started playing instantly. This also appealed to those who don’t like to wait or those who simply prefer not to download anything for various reasons.

Software downloads still comprised the overwhelming majority of play at this time though, as a lot of players preferred the richer graphics and the better game selection that the dedicated casino software still provided.

People running Macs, Linux, Ubuntu, or anything else were brought into the fold though with all this, and more and more online casino sites saw the benefits of offering both download and no download versions.

The no download experience continued to improve and become more popular over the years. Today, due to advances in technology, the quality of the no download experience at many online sites is barely distinguishable from the software versions, and many don’t even offer software based play anymore.

Online Casinos Go Mobile

A second major event in the history of casinos occurred when mobile casino gaming became available. This took the casino experience from your home computer to wherever you happen to be at, as long as you had internet connectivity. So now you could play not only anytime, but from virtually anywhere.

Like the desktop online casino market, things started out with software based play, and the main focus was on the two main operating systems for mobile devices, Android and Apple iOS. Some early mobile casinos only offered access with just one type of device, often iOS, in spite of Android being more popular.

In time though, quite a few online casinos offered both. This at least brought the majority of mobile users into the game, although users of other types of devices such as Windows phones, Blackberries, and others were left out.

While these sites often had no download browser based play, playing in a standard web browser on a phone wasn’t something very practical, as these browsers were designed for home computers, and the screen of phones in particular was way too small to display the web pages properly.

The trend lately though has been toward mobile browsing, and like the no download browser based versions that brought everyone into the game on their home computers, this new HTML technology is doing the same for mobile devices. It recognizes what device you have and optimizes the page for it.

There’s no need to download an app at all for this, and while many sites still rely on apps, we’re moving away from that now and at some point both desktop software and mobile apps will probably be a thing of the past, and sooner rather than later.

While the online casino industry has been somewhat slow to adapt and look to integrate everyone, taking full advantage of the market, this sure has changed and we’re at the point already where no matter what you use or what your operating system is, you can enjoy all the fun and excitement and convenience of playing at world class online casinos.